Naomi Ackerman

“I live my Jewish ideals, values, and passions every day. Tikun Olam is in my soul and, as an educator, I strive to teach these values to all of my students, whether they are Jewish, Israeli or juvenile delinquents in an incarceration facility in LA county. Being Jewish is my educational flashlight, and Jewish ethics are the path I take to teach. Because I am an artist, it is the arts that are my methods.”

Naomi Ackerman is the Founder and Executive Director of The Advot Project in Los Angeles, California. The Advot Project mission is to empower youth and young women from disadvantaged backgrounds to take control of their destiny by teaching them communication skills and healthy relationships through theater arts.

Advot (which means “ripples” in Hebrew) offers a variety of unique interactive programs customizable to various populations including students and incarcerated youth, and works in collaboration with nonprofit organizations.

Ms. Ackerman’s original curriculum projects also include Listen to Me When I Speak, a program that uses theater as a tool to help mothers and daughters develop better communication skills, and Home Shalom, which aims to raise awareness about domestic violence in the Jewish community, with a particular focus on teens.

Her one woman play, Flowers Aren’t Enough, which tells the story of a battered woman, has been presented over 1,800 times internationally, translated into four languages and experienced by over 300,000 people from Israel to India, New Zealand to South Africa. Through Home Shalom, Ms. Ackerman is currently staging the play in Los Angeles, along with workshops on healthy relationships for teens. The workshops inspire self-esteem, encourage a passion for social change, promote self-empowerment and teach the crucial skills necessary to create healthy relationships that prevent intimate partner violence, all within the context of Jewish tradition, values and the wisdom of thousands of years of Jewish civilization.

A self-described freelance Jewish educator, Ms. Ackerman also teaches workshops on how to use theater as an educational tool in day schools, supplementary schools and synagogues across the country and has served as artist-in-residence at Camp Ramah in Ojai since 2007. She regularly presents at conferences on the topic of using arts to teach about Jewish ethics and she works closely with MATI, the Israeli cultural center in Los Angeles, on producing multi media events about Israel.

Since 2007, Ms. Ackerman has also served as the Artist-in-Residence at Camp Ramah in California where she trains staff on all levels to use arts as a tool to teach Jewish Values and Jewish text.

Ms. Ackerman received her BA from Hebrew University, with a double major in Theater and Education and received a Special Education Teachers’ certificate from the David Yellen Teachers Seminar in Jerusalem and she trained at the Ruth Duchess Film Actor Studio in Jerusalem. Ms. Ackerman has also completed training with the Jewish Funds for Social Justice, AJWS, and with the Dream Lab at American Jewish University.